The first two laws of politics: Nannestad and Paldam’s “Cost of Ruling” revisited

Abstract

Two decades ago, Peter Nannestad and Martin Paldam (2009) published a paper in which, having analyzed 282 elections held between 1948 and 1997 in 19 developed democracies, they claimed that all incumbent parties on average incur a “cost of ruling” of approximately 2.25% points per term. They called this cost a “robust fact,” “an unusually stable constant” that operates across countries, institutions, and time. I evaluate how well N&P’s empirical assertions hold up in a much larger set of elections held in a set of well-established democracies similar to the one they studied, as well as in other, more recent electoral democracies outside the OECD region.